They've staged tomorrow's build for QA so that's a good sign.

I'd kind of go the other direction.  Although the laws of science/magic don't change, the approach to how to solve a given problem is as vast and varied as there are people researching it.  Therefore, the tech/design/ritual used to generate a given effect, even the approach to get there, may yield vastly different paths.  And at least with GalCiv2, different races have vastly different cultural and biological variances.  So they should take very different approaches to tech.

In Elemental, I would imagine the same but only with different races and outlooks.

I don't really agree here.  

The #1 reason Stardock has beens successful is repeat business.  We're in this for the long haul.  We don't look at Elemental on its own. We look at ALL our future games and applications.  If we don't make people feel like Elemental was a great game in the long-run, it'll cause business harm in the long run.

The biggest obstacle (with the benefit of hindsight) to Elemental was the size of the team. We had never managed a team with more than a half dozen people. Elemental had nearly 20 full time people involved and there were a lot of people putting their fingers in a lot of things.  

Why is the AI so "brain dead"? Well, if you farm monsters (something I wasn't aware of as a strategy and I made the AI) you can totally flatten the AI.  

Stardock, as a company, is much more like the type of company that many internet users would probably create in the sense that there's very very few managers at Stardock.  This blew up in our face because there just were too many people involved and too few managers (basically none, I did AI, Scott, our producer, did the campaign, and the rest was handled by each group). In a normal setup, the Producer (Scott) would be overseeing things day to say and the Executive Producer (me) would dabble maybe but generally stay disconnected from the day to day in order to be objective.

With Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, I was the executive producer on both and was able to offer useful feedback (the economic system in Sins, the citadel system + flag system in Demigod) because I wasn't pesonally involved day to day.

By contrast, on Elemental, if I'm making the AI and someone else is making it so you can get 1000 gildar loot from killing a monster and I have no idea about that, you end up with a walk over of the AI since it's no sweat to crank out peasants that are more powerful than channelers.  

If anyone here has ever thought about game design, consider how easy it is to totally mess up the pacing and gameplay of something with just a few variable changes. For instance, why are soldiers so much better than spell casters in Elemental v1.0? The reason is because it's so easy to get super powerful guys versus the difficulty in getting super powerful spell casters (it doesn't help that the shard magnification does didly in v1.0).

The big changes going in at this point is the removal of chefs from the kitchen. It was never our intent for individual developers to start inserting their own preferences on their own into the code. But it happened and the results speak for themselves.  

Combine the above with a general compatibility issue and bang. You have a disaster on your hands. It's a lot to live and learn from and it's been heartbreaking for all of us who spent 3 years on this game.  The layoffs we had at Stardock were painful but allowed us to move back to our traditional model of not relying on game revenue to pay the bills and give us the luxury of focusing on Elemental until it is the game we all want.

Sooo...is that a yes or no on the pony?

O MY GOD...I a laughed so hard at this my side hurts. People in the office think I lost it. 

I have to agree.  I'm not sure I want epic battles like is being suggested.  That's not really MoM esque, it's... well, total war esque.

Agreed, that's not the kind of battles I'm looking for either.

I also wanted to add that you've got my repeat business Brad (even though I can still kick the pants off your AI currently without farming the mobs for gold at all --- sorry, I couldn't resist). 

Glad about this.

One question - a little off topic - but I noticed that in the current survey/poll the racial short-comings and racial blandness of the game wasn't mentioned. Is this on the cards to be worked on at all in the future? Seems this gets glossed over all the time and is rarely officially addressed. I'm not sure if this is either a:

1. We don't think it is a problem
2. Too hard to make the races unique
3. Not a critical item but will be worked on later
4. Will be looked at soon.
5. We're currently working on it.

Thanks.

Would the AI really be fine if players didn't have the ability to farm monsters for loot? I was under the impression that the problems went quite a bit deeper then a simple gameplay mechanic that it was not able to take advantage of.

So, just re-quoting what was already posted magically increases reading comprehension?  Thanks, that IS helpful!

And there was much rejoicing.  I honestly didn't know there were this many MOM fans out there.  I thought I was the only one that thought that game was incredible.  To me Elemental feels like a very nice progression of this.  I LOVE the squads reducing in size visually as their hit points go down. Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.